The Nineteenth Century

Portraiture was also important but landscapes and folk customs began to express in this period. The first painting school of American art was the Hudson River of landscape painters, 1820 (The Hudson River School style involved carefully detailed paintings with romantic, almost glowing lighting); Asher B. Durand (1796-1886) and Thomas Cole (1801-1848) were prominent artists of this School. Frederic Edwin Church (1826 – 1900) was also a landscape painter. He was a central figure in this Hudson River School. Albert Bierstadt was also part of the Hudson River School (not an institution but rather an informal group of like-minded painters).

The Hudson River painters' directness and simplicity of vision influenced and inspired such later artists as John Kensett and the Luminists; as well as George Inness and the tonalists (which included Albert Pinkham Ryder, Ralph Blakelock among others), and Winslow Homer (1836–1910), who depicted rural America—the sea, the mountains, and the people who lived near them. Middle-class city life found its painter in Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), an uncompromising realist whose unflinching honesty undercut the genteel preference for romantic sentimentalism. The Hudson River School landscape painter Robert S. Duncanson, and Henry Ossawa Tanner who studied with Thomas Eakins were two of the first important African American painters.

Ruined Tower by Thomas Cole, 1832-36

By the 1830s, landscape painting had become the vehicle for depicting a national identity. Throughout the rest of the century, the depiction of the American land took a variety of forms - as mysterious and sublime wilderness, a new territory requiring scientific documentation, the pioneers' territorial and natural destiny, or as the individual's private retreat.

In the late 1880s, Impressionism appeared in America. Theodore Robinson, Mary Cassatt and Childe Hassam are examples of this School. James Abbott McNeill Whistler worked mainly in Europe; he was a precursor of abstract art.

History painting was also a popular genre in American art during the 19th century. William B. T. Trego a war artist was one of the last of the genre. During his lifetime, Trego painted over 200 historical and military paintings.

Landscape Scene from the Last of the Mohicans by Thomas Cole, 1827.

Rocks and Western Shore of Gloucester Outer Harbor by Fitz Hugh Lane, 1857.

The Coast of Labrador by William Bradford, 1866.

Storm in the Mountains by Albert Bierstadt, 1870.

Max Schmitt in a Single Scull by Thomas Eakins, 1871.

The Gross Clinic by Thomas Eakins, 1875.

Gate of Shehal, Morocco by Edwin Lord Weeks, 1880.

An Arizona Sunset Near the Grand Canyon, by Thomas Moran, 1898.

The Gulf Stream by Winslow Homer, 1899.